TRAVIS BAIN'S
SHORT FILMS
University student Linda (Katherine Fuery) is walking home from her campus late one night when she’s suddenly set upon by a knife-wielding rapist (Matt O’Sullivan) who’s been terrorizing the student body. Just when it seems he’s about to make her his latest victim, however, Linda turns the tables, and the predator becomes the prey. A psychological suspense thriller in the tradition of Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden. (10 min.)
My first “real” short film, The Wrong Girl was shot on Betacam SP over two freezing nights in August 1998 with a crew of four: myself, cameraman Jared Young, script supervisor Rani “Goose” Ramsay, and a guy named Simon (whose surname escapes me at this point) recording sound. It was screened at the 1999 Byron Bay and Bathurst Film Festivals. It was hard work but fun to make.
Kelly’s (Anna Lehmann) washing machine has broken down, forcing her to visit a laundromat for the first time in her life. It is here that she meets James (John Crampton), a suave, self-confessed “laundromat guru” with a nice smile and a lilting Irish brogue. James and Kelly hit it off straight away, and romance is all but guaranteed … until things take a drastic wrong turn. Full Moon, Dirty Laundry is a bittersweet tale of how labour-saving devices can bring us together … and just as easily tear us apart. (8 min.)
Full Moon, Dirty Laundry was my first and last film shot on 35mm film, made in late 1998. It was telecined to Betacam SP and edited on an Avid. On Full Moon I had the biggest crew I’ve ever worked with, and I must say it kind of put me off large crews forever, because most of them just stood around doing nothing while a handful of us got on with the job of actually making the film. In early 2000, Full Moon, Dirty Laundry was screened to an appreciative audience at the Bondi Tranz-Fix Multimedia Festival in Sydney. It’s my little statement about lost opportunities, a simple little two-hander with nice performances from Anna Lehmann and Irish backpacker John Crampton, who, before this, had never acted professionally in his life. You can watch it for free here:
Students Dale (John Comino), Hayden (Michael Canfield) and Robbie (James Mannion) are taking their new friend—American exchange student Lee (Troy Mackinder)—out to see the last-ever Hoodoo Gurus concert. There’s just one problem: Lee isn’t allowed into the club because he’s not wearing a collared shirt. The solution? Time to introduce Lee to the great Australian art of snowdropping—stealing clothes from clotheslines. A comedy for anyone who has ever bent the law just a little. (5 min.)
Snowdroppers was made especially for the Brisbane Courier-Mail What’s On short film competition. It was shot on 14-year-old 16mm ex-ABC film stock that had been stored in someone's freezer, and the sound was recorded on a Hi-8 camcorder. Amazingly, we won the competition. The first prize was $1,500, a day-long tour of the Warner Roadshow Movie World studios and lunch with some bigwigs from the Pacific Film & Television Commission who politely ignored all my efforts to obtain film funding for the next few years. Snowdroppers went on to be screened at the 1999 Bathurst Film Festival.
Snowdroppers was a hard, hard slog over five long, cold nights in my backyard. We finished the shoot at 5.00 a.m. on the last night of filming just as the sun was coming up. In 2010 I gave Snowdroppers a healthy dose of digital noise reduction (DNR) and a new colour grade, so while it doesn't exactly look like a reference-quality Blu-Ray, it now looks better than it ever has before. Snowdroppers is one of my favourites of all the short films I’ve made. It’s just good clean fun.
U.S. astronauts Jack Taylor (Craig Thomas) and Lewis McDaniel (Michael Hoffensetz) make history when they become the first humans to land on Mars. Their spacecraft, Avenger, has been blown off course by a dust storm, situating them within walking distance of the mysterious “face” on the planet’s surface, an extraordinary geological formation which closely resembles a humanoid face, and which some believe to be evidence of a long-perished alien civilization. Taylor and McDaniel decide to investigate the “face” for themselves, little knowing that there are rogue elements at NASA who are prepared to do anything to preserve the face’s secrets … (7 min.)
On a high after winning two film competitions in a row, my team and I decided to make The Face of Forever specifically for Brisbane's Red Dirt Film Festival. We shot it on DVCAM, which was dubbed down to Super-VHS because unfortunately we didn't have access to a DVCAM deck in our editing suite. The first prize was a JVC digital camcorder. Happily, we won it.
Despite our success, though, The Face of Forever was cursed from the beginning. We had too little money and too little time and everything that could go wrong did go wrong, so the film didn’t exactly turn out to be the dark space epic I’d envisioned. It sort of turned out like a bad Roger Corman movie instead - you can easily tell that it was made for about $3.50. It’s the most embarrassing of all my short films, so I’ll most probably never let it see the light of day again.
We sold the camcorder (which wasn’t worth keeping; it didn't even have a FireWire port) and used the proceeds to finance our next film, Daniel's Jack.
Travelling salesman Daniel is having a really bad day. His car’s got a flat tyre, his mobile phone’s dead, and he’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere. His only hope lies in the faintly glimmering lights of a farmhouse off in the distance. They’d better not have a dog … (6 min.)
After winning three film competitions in a row, I decided to try for the Holy Grail of Australian short film competitions: Tropfest. Unfortunately, despite everyone's best efforts and some good production values (the film was shot on Super 16mm, and the sound was mixed at the Warner Studios on the Gold Coast), Daniel didn’t make the finals, but to be perfectly honest, when I saw some of the other so-called “films” that did, I was kind of glad.
Daniel's Jack was only ever meant to be a gag film - nothing more, and hopefully nothing less. It was never meant to win Academy Awards, just make people laugh. Unfortunately not everyone saw it that way. Some turtleneck-wearing reviewer from an Australian movie magazine mauled Daniel's Jack, branding it a rip-off of some other Queensland guy’s short film (simply entitled Jack) which I'd never even heard of. He’d missed the point of the film entirely. Anyway, who cares? I don’t make my films for reviewers. Check it out here and have a chuckle:
Lifeguard Jillian Ross (Kate Gildea) has well and truly had enough of unfaithful boyfriends. So when she finds out that her latest squeeze, Troy (Oliver Jacobsen), has been having an affair with some bimbo named Stacey, she decides that enough is enough. Troy pays Jillian a visit one morning as she patrols the surf from her watchtower. Jillian encourages him to take a swim to freshen up ... but not until he's had a swig from the odd-coloured liquid in her sports drink bottle ... (7 min.)
Lifesaver was made as kind of a warm-up for my first feature Scratched. It was supposed to take place on a relatively isolated beach with no-one around, but it ended up being shot on a crowded Sunshine Coast beach surrounded by skyscrapers because I had foolishly entrusted the location scout to my co-producer and he’d assured me that the beach was perfect for our needs. I spent the whole day having to carefully choose camera angles that wouldn't reveal all the gawking tourists around us. Oh well.
Lifesaver was shot on a Sony 3CCD camcorder and represented my permanent departure from shooting on film. Lifesaver isn't likely to surface anytime soon because I lost the master copy, leaving me with only poor-quality VHS dubs.